This study presents an analysis of Malay peasant resistance to the Islamic zakat today and of French peasant resistance earlier to the Christian tithe, but it is offered with a larger argument in mind. Its purpose is to show that a vast range of what counts—or should count—as peasant resistance involves no overt protest and requires little or no organization.

It is well known that upon emerging victorious from the Mexican Revolution in 1920, the Constitutionalists confronted a dilemma. Having defeated the popular armies of Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa, they believed that they had won the right to construct a postrevolutionary state reflecting their interests. Yet the spectors of the popular armies were to haunt them. The new revolutionary elites were forced to determine how to create a state in their own Constitutionalist image and simultaneously how to avoid provoking further popular insurrection.

The venerable conservative credentials of “communitye” have been challenged vigorously and often in recent years. Perhaps nowhere has its conceptual renovation gone further than in studies of peasants and social change. Where once the solidarity of peasant communities was analyzed as an impediment to economic development and societal modernization, a growing body of work now portrays such solidarity as the basis of revolutionary upheaval from eighteenth-century France to contemporary Vietnam.

Until fairly recently, grain riots were viewed as spontaneous reactions of the poor to hunger, not worthy of detailed analysis. Over the past twenty years, partially as a result of pioneering studies by George Rudé and Edward Thompson with reference to France and Britain, a considerable body of scholarly writing about these disturbances has appeared. Consistent cross-cultural patterns have emerged from this research. Grain riots were not necessarily a product of hunger, although they were a facet of struggles over the control of food. They have normally taken one of two forms. One was the market riot, where the crowd protested against the price or lack of availability of grain. Such disturbances often commenced with the offer to buy grain at a “just” or “customary” price. If this demand was not met, more drastic action was taken. Sometimes rioters seized grain and sold it to the crowd for a just price, and then turned the receipts over to the owners of the grain. More often grain was strewn about, destroyed, or stolen. The second main form of grain riot was the blockade. In times of shortage, people prevented the export of grain from a town or district because they believed that merchants and landlords should not benefit from scarcity and that such exports would drive up the price locally. Sometimes retributive action accompanied or followed both types of protest, meting out punishment to traders, landlords, or others who were perceived as wrongly profiting from food shortages. Such action usually took the form of wholesale looting. In general, grain rioters avoided serious violence.

This essay is no more than a preliminary endeavor to examine analogies between principles of land tenure in the recent history of an East African society and what appear to be strikingly similar principles that obtained in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in England. If these analogies are demonstrable with a reasonable degree of plausibility, a useful framework of reference may be established within which some broader theoretical issues can be discussed. One such issue is that, given a degree of structural similarity between two or more social systems, there might be a corresponding equivalence in the logic of legal thought in response to a common object of litigation—in this particular case, the subject of land tenure.

To an historian or anthropologist familiar with land problems in Fiji, nothing would have been less predictable than the urban discontents over land rights since independence, for these disturbances, in an ethnically plural society whose colonial history is marked by hostility between Indians and Fijians, were among the Fijians themselves. During the whole of the colonial period, from cession of the islands to Britain in 1874 to independence in 1970, the coexistence of Europeans, Indians (first imported as indentured labor), and Fijians had been forged out of land law. Successive colonial administrations labored for four decades around the turn of the century to secure for Fijians a precapitalist system of property rights that would become a bulwark against encroachment by a white planter and settler community. The system “by law established” subsequently became the basis for hostility between several generations of rural Fijian landowners and a growing number of landless Indian peasants. By the time self-government arrived in the mid-1960s, Indian access to land and Fijian resistance thereto was the most important issue threatening the stability of the new state, and government-commissioned reports and legislative acts pointed to this conflict of interest as the most significant problem for an independent Fiji. But the authoritative history written from commission reports and based on administrative policy often conceals another history, that formed by the experience of everyday life, where opposed groups confront each other over interests not always visible to legislators and judges, and often less so to scholarly observers.

This essay is about concepts of time and the past among the Maya Indians of Yucatan in southeastern Mexico. It explores how these concepts fit into the Maya's general view of the way the world works and how they relate to certain dynamics of Maya history—as we define history—during their pre-Hispanic and colonial past. One inspiration has been the often baffling written records the Maya have left, from which we try to quarry historical facts without always enquiring what the records meant to the people who produced them. The other is the reminder, provided by recent historical work from anthropologists, that people do not record their past so much as construct it, with an eye to the present, and at the same time use that past in molding the present.